The MacDairmuid, that looks like a lot of work. Why not just rename win.com to something like win.old then you can run setup & it won’t detect the old windows.
I wouldn’t try putting W98 on top of SE.
I use System Suite 2000 for W98/SE issues it has a ton of programs in it to test everything & do registry cleaning & registry defrag & hd cleaning & defrag & complete test of all system components.
Yes, hello all. Greetings, Dopers who shared their vast experience and suggestions with me. I stand before you fairly humbled.
A week or two ago, I had to replace the sidewall-mounted muffin fan that provides overall cooling to the motherboard. The bearings were shot, and it was vibrating.
As I sat here, having every piece of software in the machine crash within a few seconds of loading it up, it occurred to me that perhaps something was amiss physically, not electronically.
I took off the side panel, and removed the cord going to the motherboard that powers the muffin fan. I believe that when I installed the fan, I must have knocked against the stiff ribbon cable that connects BOTH hard drives to the motherboard. The plastic connector on the ribbon cable was partially detached from it’s pin connector on the motherboard.
Oh, don’t worry, I have saved you all the trouble of cursing me out, by doing it to myself. Arrgh, I felt like an idiot. Now, it didn’t guarantee that this was the problem, but it gave me a road to travel that I’d not previously considered. ( And, should have ). I put my wrist grounding strap on, and got busy. I pulled and reseated both RAM chipsets. I wiggled gingerly in the fan locked to the CPU, so it was seated well. I reseated the two cards I have in the machine. And, of course, I pulled and reseated ALL ribbon connectors to all devices.
It’s been about a day and a half and the machine hasn’t burped once. Unless it’s just been an unusually long run before the intermittent returns, I believe that that partially pulled ribbon cable connector was the culprit.
Thank you for the most excellent advice, all. I will print this thread ANYWAY, because at some point, such ills befall us all and it really will be a software issue.
------Color me ruefully red,
Cartooniverse
You don’t need to run FDisk to reinstall.
Fire up Windows and copy the whole CD to a subdirectory in your HDD (eg c:\w98). Yes, I know about bootable CDs.
Reboot to a command prompt (press F8 at the appropriate point).
Run SMARTDRV C+
Rename c:\windows\win.ini and c:\windows\win.com
Rename c:\windows
The above two steps will stop Windows redetecting itself and also allow you to regress if things go wrong.
Switch to where you copied your Windows CD and run setup from the Win98 directory and Bob’s your uncle.
My advice would to follow qts suggestion below. You should be able to reinstall Windows without affecting any of the data files you have. Make sure you don’t reformat your hard drive, just reinstall.
However, (this might be a stupid question), but have you rebooted your computer? Whenever I get GPF constantly, I reboot and the problems go away. Some of those problems could be memory leaks or program conflicts that are fixed when the OS is reloaded. This is not such a stupid question because I know people who never reboot their computer and always have screwing things happening when running programs. The GDI.exe error doesn’t look good though. IIRC, it’s a program that handles system calls from user programs to kernel operations regarding to the devices. I don’t know how that would affect your programs though.
Teebone
Close. Boris is my uncle, but I catch your drift. I’m still crashing, just not as much. Odd, that a physical manifestation has now become an electronic one. Odd, and tragic. Teebone, this is the Straight Dope. There ARE no stupid questions, okay?
Yes, I have rebooted it a few dozen times since this started. Frequently, when it happens, rebooting the machine is the only way to eliminate the problem, for the moment. Sometimes, the machine locks so hard that my cursor locks as well, and I’m left with the 'ole power button. 
A bit harsh for my tastes, but I’m left with no choice.
It is maddening when I get onto the Internet and the box appears with the message ‘The program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down.’ Worse still is the white message box. With the routine (gray) box, I need to start all over again (I have Windows 98 Plus! on my computer at home); with the white one, I may as well reboot! :mad:
Here at the Torrance (CA) Public Library, some of the public computers have the “Watson Non-Fatal Error,” which shuts the computer down, much like someone walking into your house and shutting the TV off while you’re watching. I usually want to chew nails when this happens! :mad:
Your friend is wrong with regards to the memory cap.
I actually just had a DIMM of RAM go bad on me a couple weeks back. Took a bit of trial and error, but I traced down my problems to a stick of PC133 128MB RAM. It gaved me all sorts of weird erros.
Definetly worth a check if all else fails (heck! Or maybe even first!)
Yeah, Bernse. My local guru has a RAM-Checker. I’ll pull the doors off, yank the chips and slip them into a non-static bag.Then I’ll gore myself with a few yards of thick copper wire, wrap THAT to the engine block to ground myself further, and drive over to see him.
One cannot be too careful.
Toon, Welcome to the world of computer tech. I don’t curse you for your problem. Rather, I am glad you figured it out on your own. If not, I’d have had to charge you an obscene amount to come fix a simple problem. 
At any rate, keep my intructions for the wipe & reload. And do so every six months. … No charge on that.